Saturday, 20 December 2014

Christmas TV moments

I haven't been keeping up with this blog very well lately, but here is a piece I've just done for the Guardian about five key moments of Christmas TV. Merry Christmas.

On
Christmas night 1937, the BBC television studios at Alexandra Palace on London’s
northern heights were shrouded in freezing smog. When the Music Hall Cavalcade
finished at 10pm, viewers were so concerned for the performers that they rang up
the studios offering them lifts home. That Christmas, a year after television
broadcasts had begun, showed that the few thousand people with TV sets were
forging an intimate relationship with the new medium. Hundreds of them sent
cards to the studios or rang up to wish the artistes a happy Christmas. The idea
of a special festive schedule was taking shape, with an adaptation of Alice in
Wonderland, a Christmas Cabaret and “Television’s First Grand Christmas
Pantomime: Dick Whittington and His Cat”. But Lord Reith was still in charge,
so there was no television on Boxing Day - a Sunday.

Our modern
idea of Christmas owes as much to television as it does to the Victorians. Christmas
and TV are made for each other: they both rely on the sense of a scattered,
intangible national community, gathered in 20 million living rooms. Just as
Christmas is ecumenical enough in its customs to be celebrated by people of all
faiths and no faith, television requires us only to make the rudimentary
commitment of turning on the set in order to join its fleeting and virtual society
of viewers. Recalling the Christmas television of the past is an evocative but
slightly eerie experience. It makes you realise just how much forced bonhomie
and fake snow, a lot of it filmed under baking studio lights in August, has
been deployed over the last seventy-odd years to convince us that at this time
of year we have something in common.

The
Queen’s first television broadcast, 1957

At 3pm on
Christmas Day 1957, the screens of about 6 million televisions dissolved to
reveal the Queen in the long library at Sandringham, with pictures of her
children on her desk. A reluctant performer who did not even like the cameras
settling on her face during Trooping the Colour, she had agreed to have her
Christmas broadcast televised for the first time. Having refused the aid of the
recently invented teleprompter, she delivered her lines from a clearly visible script.
Many viewers at home stood to attention for the duration of her speech, as they
had done since her grandfather delivered the first Christmas radio broadcast 25
years earlier.

“My own
family often gather round to watch television as they are this moment, and that
is how I imagine you now,” the Queen said to a microphone hidden in a sprig of
holly. “I very much hope that this new medium will make my Christmas message
more personal and direct.” But she also expressed concern about “the speed at
which things are changing all around us” and about “unthinking people who
carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery”.

That
August, John Grigg, then Lord Altrincham, had published an article in the National
and English Review which criticised the Queen’s “tweedy” advisers who, for fear
of destroying her mystique, had ensured her speeches were “prim little sermons”
delivered in the manner of “a priggish schoolgirl”. Grigg argued that, in a modern
democracy, the monarchy needed to adapt “to perform the seemingly impossible
task of being at once ordinary and extraordinary”. The Queen’s television
broadcast was both a rejoinder to Grigg and a concession that he may have had a
point.

Members of
the BBC’s audience research panel said that it was “a real thrill to see the
Queen so clearly and so close” and that it had made them feel as if “she is
really our friend and not a removed figure”. Other viewers had different
priorities. The BBC’s telephone duty log recorded hundreds of complaints after
the failure of outside broadcast equipment meant that the programme scheduled straight
after the Queen, Billy Smart’s Family Party from Windsor, had to be abandoned and
replaced by a Ronald Colman film, followed by light songs from Elton Hayes. A BBC
spokesman said the Windsor area was “difficult to transmit from”.

Apollo 8
interrupts the festive schedules, 1968

Christmas
television’s strangest quality is its juxtaposition of sacrality and banality, solemnity
and froth. This contrast was unusually jarring over Christmas 1968, when the
schedules were interrupted by the crew of Apollo 8 presenting 20-minute
broadcasts daily at about 1.30pm British time. The first, on 22 December,
showed the astronaut Neil Anders clowning around with a toothbrush, turning
weightlessness into a party game for the first time in history, and the first-ever
glimpse of the earth from interplanetary space, as James Lovell pointed his
camera out of the cabin window. Sadly, the telephoto lens failed to work and
the earth on TV looked like a tiny blob of light, resembling a distant bicycle
headlight on a road at night.

The next
day, however, the camera was working and viewers could clearly see the earth
from 175,000 miles away. Britain was covered in cloud. The Cambridge cultural
critic Raymond Williams declared it “a new way of seeing” and compared it to
the revolving earth that BBC1 used as its channel ident. He saw “the north and
west in ragged shadow; the bright Caribbean; the atlas shapes of the Americas …
I glanced from its memory to the spinning globe of BBC-1 presentation: light,
untextured, slightly oiled. It was necessary to remember that both were
television.”

Apollo 8
reached the moon on Christmas Eve, and seasonal specials like Cilla and Sooty’s
Christmas Party were interrupted by ticker-tape summaries, moving across the
bottom of the screen, informing viewers where the spacecraft was. While Patrick
Moore was commenting on the most perilous moment in the mission, the “critical
burn” when the astronauts had to fire the lunar module’s rocket to lock them
into a closed orbit round the moon, the BBC interrupted him to go to Christmas Jackanory.

As the
astronauts orbited the moon, viewers heard them read out the opening verses of
Genesis, before mission commander Frank Borman signed off with “good night,
good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you, all of you on the good
Earth”. As with the best Christmas television, those modern-day Magi, the three
lunar astronauts, had managed to land just the right side of schmaltz.

Morecambe
and Wise unite the nation, 1977

At 8.55pm
on Christmas night 1977, according to the BBC’s own figures, 28.5 million people
sat down for an hour and ten minutes and watched the Morecambe and Wise
Christmas Show. Audience statistics at the time were much disputed, and ITV’s ratings
system had Morecambe and Wise beaten that night by Mike Yarwood. But their 1977
show has still entered folk memory as the culmination of television’s potential
to bring the nation together. The following year, updating his father J.A.R.
Pimlott’s book The Englishman’s Christmas, Ben Pimlott wrote that “for those who
digest their mid-day Christmas dinner in an armchair, the Christmas edition of
the Morecambe and Wise show has established itself as an essential part of the
Festival”.

This level
of expectation came at a cost to the key participants. Eric Morecambe was so
full of fear-induced adrenalin before the Christmas show that he came out in
sties and got a nervous itch in his ear. The show took Eddie Braben five weeks
to write, working 16-hour days, pushing himself close to nervous exhaustion. When
he watched it on Christmas day, his whole body was clenched with tension,
unplacated by the studio audience laughter.

Not
everyone at the time considered the 1977 show a classic: Clive James in the Observer
thought Morecambe had been funnier ad libbing with Dickie Davies on World of
Sport on Christmas Eve. But then, as our last link with vaudeville, Morecambe
and Wise’s act had always relied on comforting familiarity and repetition. “They
do not so much deliver their lines, as resuscitate them,” said an admiring
Dennis Potter in the Sunday Times.

It helped
that, after the IMF crisis at the end of 1976, Christmas 1977 was a time of
modest optimism: the pound was recovering, inflation was down and wages rising
modestly. It was also the high watermark of three-channel terrestrial television.
After spreading slowly across the country for 40 years, the transmitters now reached
almost everywhere, with 99.5% of the population able to receive BBC1 and the
majority of homes now having a colour TV – more, in fact, than had a telephone.
The Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, formerly a television refusenik, wrote in his
Orcadian column of his relief at getting hold of the Radio Times Christmas
issue after the Stromness paper shop had sold out and he faced “a bleak
prospect of groping blindly about in a fog of programmes for a fortnight”. Now he
could sit in front of the TV and let his mind be “fed full of shadows”.

Men
Behaving Badly at Christmas, 1998

At the end
of 1998, Britain was entering the age of digital television. Sky had just
launched a digital service of nearly 200 channels, and a BBC advert for its new
digital channels had Stephen Fry sat at the dinner table asking his television
to “pass the salt please, darling”. In place of a community of viewers, the
digital age promised a profusion of personal choice. The outgoing BBC director-general,
John Birt, predicted that “broadcasting will one day no longer be a shared
cultural experience”.

The
Christmas schedules reflected this sense of the ending of an era. BBC1’s Christmas
night consisted of Changing Rooms at Christmas, an episode of Men Behaving
Badly in which Gary attempted to cure his impotence by masturbating over his
collection of porn magazines, and the comedy sports quiz They Think It's All
Over. The evening’s TV seemed to reflect a nation in love with lifestyle fads
and new-lad banter and suspicious of earnestness and tradition. In the Daily
Mail, the novelist Malcolm Bradbury worried that in “an age of easy sensations,
soft scandals, featureless celebrities … the hope that a family can gather
around a TV set to share a common programme and the spirit of the season is
probably dying. Maybe this disappointing TV Christmas is nothing less than the
spirit of Christmases to come.”

At the end
of 1998, Graham McCann had published an acclaimed biography of Morecambe and
Wise, which began with a setpiece about the 1977 Christmas Show as a vanished
moment of national unity. On Christmas day afternoon, BBC1 reran Morecambe and
Wise’s Christmas 1973 show – the one with André Previn conducting Eric playing
Grieg’s piano concerto, much fresher and funnier than 1977 - to remind viewers
of what they had lost.

The survival
of the TV Christmas, 2014

By 2014, though,
it was clear that rumours about the death of the television Christmas had been exaggerated.
The season began in mid-November with the Christmas TV adverts for John Lewis
and Sainsbury’s being dissected by everyone in search of signs and portents. Then,
in early December, there was the time-honoured tradition of the Christmas
schedules being announced to the ritualistic lament from the tabloids and the Taxpayers’
Alliance about the BBC fobbing us off with repeats.

Communal
viewing had turned out to be more resilient than people had feared at the start
of the digital era. These people had overestimated the desire of viewers to
become active consumers, forever searching catch-up services and the higher
numbers of the remote control for “content”. Instead, and especially at
Christmas, they were slothful and habit-loving. They wanted to flop passive-aggressively
in front of the set, moaning about there being nothing on except Through the
Christmas Keyhole or the Come Dine With Me Christmas Special – and then watching
them anyway.

There was still
plenty of family entertainment: Harry Hill as Professor Branestawm, Chummy and
Trixie helping with the Sunday School Christmas Concert in Call The Midwife and
Strictly Come Dancing welcoming back Bruce Forsyth, a man who had first
appeared on television aged 11 in 1939. Although religious ceremony was now mostly
banished from the TV, we still had the white magic and quasi-mysticism of Doctor
Who, with the Doctor and Clara trapped on an Arctic base with Father Christmas.

Christmas television
has long had this incantatory quality, this rhetorical conjuring up of a collective
national life. Perhaps its imagined community of viewers has always been
imaginary and TV only ever offers what Dennis Potter called “the flickering
illusion of communality”. Or perhaps that fragile sense of togetherness becomes
half-real simply by being invoked.

Those
watching in 2014 would certainly still have recognised the Christmas night
routine of the playwright Peter Nichols, who spent the evening in 1969 with his
extended family crammed into the tiny living room of his in-laws’ semi-detached
in Bristol. “Back in the roomful of furniture and family, we sit watching
Petula Clark singing ‘Holy Night’,” he wrote in his diary. “Val Doonican
crooning a lullaby to Wendy Craig, the Young Generation dancing the life of
Jesus. The children are shouted at every time they block an adult’s view. They
want to play with the toys they’ve been given, not grasping that the important
part, the giving, is over for another year and they should sit like grateful
mutes and let us watch our favourite stars.”

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About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
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